Touch-Screen Voting In 2004?

Although the presidential race has yet to be decided, there's wide agreement that it revealed embarrassing weaknesses in the way we conduct our elections.

This week, Wisconsin banned punch-card ballots and an election board in Chicago has asked for help in redesigning its butterfly ballots.

CBS News Correspondent Russ Mitchell reports that politicians and policy experts agree that America needs to re-examine how to conduct an accurate, reliable election.

"Despite over 200 years of elections, we still vote as if we live in the 19th century," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D- NY.

Ernest Gans, a member of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, told CBS News, "The system, as far as ballot standards — the way we cast and count ballots — is broke and it's time to fix it."

Connecticut Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, who like Florida's Katherine Harris, is charged with running her state's elections, has been trying to focus attention on balloting problems.

"In some small way I am pleased with what has happened in Florida ... It has highlighted some important issues," she said. "How should we replace our aging fleet of voting machines?"

Roughly one in eight Americans still vote by pulling levers on 50-year-old voting booths. Connecticut alone owns 3,500 of them.

"I still think the lever voting machines are the best, but it's very difficult to get them because they're not being manufactured anymore," which also makes them increasingly hard to repair and replace, said Bysiewicz.

Connecticut is leaning toward replacing mechanical machines with cutting edge technology — paperless ATM-like touch screens that instantly record your vote. Election representatives from at least a dozen countries have been flocking to Brazil to study their voting process. The country's 170 million people vote entirely on electronic touch screens. This year, not a single election there was contested.

But critics warn that the cutting edge can come back to bite you — punch cards were the latest rage in the '70s and '80s.

Next week, Canadian Professor Bob Sinclair is publishing the results of a study he conducted in shopping malls using a mock up of the Palm Beach ballot — a ballot so flawed, he says, that 20 percent of the people voted wrong.

Canadians seem to prefer their system — based entirely on a single, uniform paper ballot that one marks with a simple "X." They are hand-counted and results are announced on election night.

But it's unlikely that our diverse and divided country will ever achieve that level of uniformity — even with $200 million in federal matching funds legislators are seeking to standardize voting methods.

Bysiewicz said she'd "be surprised if that would happen immediately because it will take a lot for the states to prepare to make that happen. They'd have to change their constitution, they'd have to change ther state laws and that can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process."